On Sat, 2009-05-09 at 14:12 -0700, koder wrote:
> Oh, THE Ted?

There is only one ;)

> Thanks for the link to the bug. Since I am not involved in development
> and am never sure what constitutes a bug. I have never spent much time
> in there. A feature that I don't care for is not a bug. I have not seen
> anyplace to discuss desired features. I presume there is one.

Well, bug is always a confusing term.  But in general, requested feature
that are more on the idea stage are better brought out in Brainstorm.

  http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com

The brainstorm ideas are watched by the community team which then pushes
for them to get on the schedule for UDS.

> I am running Ubuntu 8.04 and planning in sticking with it for a while,
> so I have not noticed the update behavior that was commented on, so I
> did not understand what the hoopla was all about.

In general, for most users, I'd suggest going from LTS to LTS.  While we
love the support and testing and feedback that we get from all of the
users on every release; for most folks LTS is a good solution.

> I also would like to see the Show Search entry icon go away. I have
> never used it, and the couple of times I tested it is did not do
> anything I wanted to use.

This has been removed in the default desktop.  It had a lot of promise,
but hasn't yet lived up to it.  Nokia has started putting money into
Tracker development, so I'm hoping that it will at some point live up to
what we thought it'd be.

> Of course, some may find the icons of tremendous use. Based on my
> understanding of the principle of Linux and Ubuntu design the route
> would be to leave it as a configurable option.

Heh, I'm not sure that Linux in general has any principles of design.
In general, it has about a thousand, which is part of the problem with
the Linux desktop feeling disjoint.  Not sure how to fix that.  It might
be something we're stuck with, though we're trying to fix it as best we
can.

> What does irritate me though is that on my laptop the update tells me it
> can only do a partial update to my software. It does not tell me why. My
> options are to do a partial update to everything, or refuse to do any
> updates at all, for ever it seems. I don't know if that is a bug or not.
> I find it strange behavior.
> 
> On an allied topic, many times an upgrade comes down with a description
> that says there is no information about the update, but it wants to
> install it anyway. If an update does not have a simple description
> available for it, is it ready for distribution? Or, perhaps to rephrase,
> if it isn't ready, including a description why is it being offered?

Yes, these are both issues with add/remove software that we're working
on.  There is an effort for Karmic surrounding "App Center" -- though
the name is very temporary -- which will fix these and a bunch of other
issues with add/remove software and hopefully make it excellent again.
The Ubuntu Desktop team is tackling it, if you'd like to participate I'd
suggest talking about it on their mailing list or showing up at their
weekly IRC meeting.  Of course the UDS sessions discussing it will be
broadcast on the Internet as well.  (there is some two-way, but it's
difficult)

		--Ted